The story’s Prologue establishes the interrelated premises that art is a valuable source of information about the artist and that viewers can be like detectives, searching the text’s drawings for clues. This supports the novel’s mystery structure, explains the presence of its illustrations, and introduces thematic ideas that the rest of the narrative will more fully develop.

Hagio’s confidence in her diagnosis of Little A establishes this theme of Artistic Creations as an Opaque Window into the Mind. Her confidence does not at this point seem misplaced because the only evidence the reader has so far is the drawing itself and Hagio’s academic and professional experience. Presenting Hagio’s ideas in the context of her role as a university professor—i.e., during a lecture—underscores this credibility. This sets up the expectation that, within the world of the novel, pictures can be relied upon as clear reflections of an artist’s interior life—an expectation that subsequent events will reveal to be somewhat flawed.

Ironically, Hagio herself notes that the lack of a door on the child’s image of a house suggests that Little A is trying to hide the truth of herself from the outside world. Hagio does not view herself as truly “outside” the house, however; she believes that as a trained interpreter of art, she is able to see inside her patient’s mind regardless of the defenses Little A has erected. Hagio thus has difficulty seeing past her own status as an expert in this situation, believing that her training and experience make her perspective more than just a personal angle of vision. In other words, her expertise makes her less sensitive to How Perspective Shapes Perception. She does not see herself as what she really is—just the first in a line of investigators who will each come away with a slightly flawed understanding of the small part of the story they have access to.

Uketsu hammers this point home with further irony. Hagio believes that her final comments to her class—that she “[remains] confident in [her] diagnosis” and that Little A is “now living happily as a mother” (8)—demonstrate the effectiveness of her methods (8). However, the emphasis on Little A’s status as a mother actually foreshadows that the murderous child Little A is Naomi, a murderous adult responsible for many more deaths, all motivated by her strong maternal instincts. Hagio’s closing comments thus lay groundwork for the theme of The Violent Contradictions of Parental Love while also demonstrating how Hagio’s beliefs (in this case, about motherhood) shape her interpretation of people and events.  

Chapter 1 introduces two amateur sleuths—Sasaki and Kurihara—whose investigations into “Raku’s” blog introduce what appears to be a brand-new mystery: the meaning of Raku’s final blog post, and how Yuki’s drawings figure into it. At this point, the only element that appears to connect the Prologue to Chapter 1 is the idea that art can reveal the mind of the artist. Chapter 1 offers qualified support for this idea. Raku successfully decodes the pictures Yuki left behind—but his success also depends on his knowledge of context and his intimacy with Yuki. Sasaki’s and Kurihara’s struggles to understand what the art means show how much these factors matter. They have several false starts, and even once they decode the message in Yuki’s art, they arrive at a conclusion that is only partially correct.

Chapter 1’s use of diagrams reinforces the idea that visual representations can be deceptive. The diagrams that chart the two men’s deductions and document their process as they solve the puzzle of Yuki’s drawings are in an entirely different style from the drawings created by Little A and Yuki. Sharp, clean lines, simple layouts with numbers and directional arrows, and word-processed explanatory text are all clues that these are meant to be taken as helpful, objective documents. Despite their appearance, however, these diagrams add little to the reader’s understanding. They often simply duplicate clear explanations already given in the narrative or document Sasaki’s false starts and misunderstandings. Like the more subjective and esoteric drawings by Little A and Yuki, these diagrams offer less information than they appear to.

Another function of these diagrams is to reinforce the sense that, despite the apparently paranormal nature of Yuki’s premonition of her death, there is a logical solution to the puzzle that the two young men are working on. Chapter 1 will not offer this solution, however: Its function is merely to offer the reader a first glimpse of the central mystery that unites the entire text. As Chapter 1 ends, this mystery seems to center on Yuki’s death, but later chapters will expand the scope of the mystery, building more suspense and tension as more victims are revealed and the threads connecting each of the chapters become more apparent.

As connections emerge, the narrative’s atmosphere of horror also grows. Midway through Chapter 1, when Yuki’s death in childbirth is revealed, a second set of ideas emerges to connect the Prologue with Chapter 1: the joy of motherhood juxtaposed against the awful truth that children—intentionally or not—sometimes kill their mothers. Little A deliberately kills her mother and then, apparently, grows up to be a happy mother herself. Yuki seems destined to be the happiest of mothers, but her child’s birth ends her life. The slow revelation of the meaning of Yuki’s eerie drawings amplifies the horror of this situation.